crmA challenge that I’m running into while scaling my startup is related to customer database management. The app has a customer database and an admin area, but I’ve found that non-technical employees such as sales and customer success want to do stuff with the customer database that the app’s admin panel doesn’t allow, such as reporting or adding notes. Over time my engineering team has added some of those features to the admin panel, but I feel that using a CRM for managing the customer database probably makes more sense going forward.
I’m looking for advice. Which CRM do you use, and why did you choose that CRM? The biggest one is Salesforce, and the sales people seem to love it because it has every feature they need, but I’m not so impressed by the UI/UX. It feels like something that only salespeople will end up using, but not everybody else, because the UI/UX feels awkward and complicated. This will put the sales team on an island, which I feel is dangerous.
Who inside your organization use the CRM? Is it only sales people? Or also other roles like marketing people, account managers, tech support people, etc? Ideally I want a CRM solution that everybody wants to use, not because they have to but because it is nice. This way, everybody inside the organization always knows exactly what is going on with a customer which improves business continuity. Does anybody recognize this problem? Which CRM fits this bill?
Finally, how do you integrate the CRM with your app? Is the integration one-way (changing stuff in the app modifies the CRM, but not the other way around) or two-way?
I'm currently evaluating a lot of CRMs.
Here's what I looked at, and what I came up with!
The only requirements I was looking for was that it should be web-based, and fairly affordable (under $5000/year). Ease of use was a major consideration also.
The features that I were looking for were as follows:
tl; dr summary
Use ProsperWorks or Pipedrive.
Here's how each of the CRMs I looked at stacked up (ranked in order of preference - loosely)
Unable to set recurring tasks, integrate with Xero natively or group contacts and export the list. The pipeline feature was excellent, and the email sync was good. Webinars are available for a product overview, but in both of the consultations I arranged, no one rang up.
Missing features:
Excellent overall, however I'd say a little cluttered and hard to use. As with Pipedrive, unable to set recurring tasks or integrate natively with Xero, also unable to add products, but grouping/exporting contacts is easy.
I was extremely impressed after I started using it: it scraped my emails for the past year and provided a list of recommendations of customers the next morning via email, having found their social media profiles and populated all the fields. I added all the customers it suggested with one click.
Excellent gmail addon. It brings the entire functionality of ProsperWorks into your gmail inbox.
Missing features:
I loved the look, and the fact that it had a TV/wall dashboard, but I found it a little... 'clunky'... to use.
Missing features:
Looks similar to Pipedrive, with less features.
Missing features:
This was the first web CRM I evaluated, and I liked it! However I started to realise after evaluating others that it didn't have everything I needed. However, it did have recurring tasks!
Missing features:
I also looked at:
but none of these really had enough of the features I was using to be worthwhile contenders.
I'd appreciate any that I've missed I'm also still evaluating.
Am I wrong? Tell me! Comment, and I'll fix up any mistakes I've made or any features I've missed.
I can’t really speak for support tools; what follows primarily focuses on sales tools.
Having tried quite a few CRMs I’d recommend you take a look at close.io (specifically designed for sales) or Hubspot (pretty much an all-in-one marketing & sales solution). They’re far superior to the other sales CRM I’ve tried over the years. (Streak is interesting to look at as well, if your sales are living in the Gmail interface.)
The most important thing for UI, IMO, is that it must be trivial for sales to enter data. It’s ideally click and edit in place, or pre-filled. Anything short of that turns adding notes and details into a chore, resulting in sales entering less of those than they’re expected to. (Salesforce, as you’ve noted, is a huge pain in this respect. This is somewhat balanced by being a market leader however, because just about every other tool out there integrates with it.)
If relevant, keep an eye out on how easy it is to place a call to prospects and clients from within the interface and on whether you can record the calls from the get go. It may sound dumb, but if you’re doing any kind of sales calls, your sales will actually make more calls when they just need to click a button to reach a client instead of manually dialing a number.
Another important aspect, to me, is what I’d call custom query functionality. This is where close.io really really shines with its query language and why I like it so much: you can create custom lists for everything you’d like to monitor, instead of being forced into pre-built screens, views, and flows.
The last crucial aspect is the API. You absolutely want it to expose your data in full, no ifs or buts, without data loss. This is for reporting purposes so you can slice and dice things the way you’d like to. And for integration purposes, since you’ll want to be able to write things to the CRM. (Aside: don’t fall prey to CMRs with built-in reporting bells and whistles: they’re usually crap except in the most generic use-cases. BaseCRM is a worst offender here, combining poor UI, mostly useless reporting screens, and data loss when using their APIs and exporters.)
As to your other series of questions, it really depends on the org. In theory everyone who interacts with a customer should be using a CRM. In practice it’s a sales or support tool first and foremost. You want anything non-sales out of your sales’ way, so they’re not distracted with the day to day drudgery of support incidents, ops, and so forth. So you probably want sales and support to use a different tool, unless you’re a SaaS with the two functions merged into a Customer Success team (i.e. you’ve no proper sales function).
With respect to one- or two-way integration, the pragmatic approach is to have a single source of truth somewhere in the org with references to relevant records (the sales CRM, support’s ticketing system, finance’s accounting system, the product itself, the latter’s billing tool, etc.) along with the key bits of information. Use that to keep the key details you’re interested in in sync, rather than trying to keep all of the individual parts in sync with one another. As a benefit of throwing all of this in a data warehouse (e.g. Redshift), you’ll be able to have marketing use the likes of Periscope Data to run arbitrary queries and reports against it.
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